OPINION: Stewart Shines Where Others Fail

By Kyle LaFleur

As a recent college graduate, I’ve heard many older people accuse my generation of foolishly overlooking traditional news sources in favor of parody programs like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report.

The accusation, however, loses its teeth when these comedy shows outperform their straight-laced media rivals.

On an episode of The Daily Show last week, Jon Stewart cited a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which a prominent climate change skeptic, University of California Berkeley Professor Richard A. Muller, acknowledged that global warming is, in fact, real.

The work of Professor Muller was prompted in part by last year’s uncovered emails in which scientists stated they had worked some of their data to bolster their claim that the climate change phenomenon existed. The emails resulted in a media circus, deemed ‘Climategate,’ leaving many around the country to passionately debate the topic.

So what was the significance of this episode of the Comedy Central program? It was summed up perfectly by Stewart, who compared major news networks’ scant coverage of the admission with the emphasis they gave the return of McDonald’s McRib.

“I don’t get this,” Stewart quipped. “Climategate was big news. The debunking of Climategate got a total of 24 seconds of cable news coverage.”

This type of report is not new for The Daily Show, who pointed out Fox News’ failure to report on their parent company Newscorps’ phone hacking scandal this summer, called out lawmakers on their refusal to move on the Zadroga Bill that would guarantee healthcare for 9/11 first responders, and devoted an entire half hour to holding CNBC’s Jim Cramer to task for faulty financial advice in March 2009.

“I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a ******* game,” said Stewart to Cramer from across the table.

It is in moments like these that The Daily Show distinguishes itself the modern era of journalism. We now swim a sea of information, but it’s growing increasingly hard to tell not only not just what has merit, but what motivations are behind it.

I am in no way advocating listening only to one of these comedy based programs for your news and world events, but it is refreshing to see that not only is journalism watching out for the general public, but that someone else is watching the journalists. Or to put it the way Stewart did on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace several months back, “The embarrassment is that I’m given credibility in this world because of the disappointment that the public has with what the news media does.”